Annelyse Gelman, _Vexations_

 I BOUGHT THIS back in January, inspired by Anahid Nersessian's review in the NYRB, and when it arrived I was surprised to see a little badge on the cover announcing the book had won the James Laughlin Award--doubly surprised, I can say, first because the Laughlin Award goes to a poet's second book and Nersessian had called the book an "extraordinary debut," second because Laughlin Award winners are mailed to me every year as a membership benefit by the Academy of American Poets, and thus I did not need to purchase the book at all. Well. Turns out that yes, this is Gelman's second book (the first was Everyone I Love Is a Stranger to Someone), and when my membership copy arrived in the mail I found it a good home.

And it deserves a good home--an extraordinary book. It's a single poem, 220 sestets--a narrative poem, perhaps, although that may be assuming too much. Something apocalyptically catastrophic has happened, ecologically or epidemiologically, but we don't know what it is. Somewhat as in Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet, we learn little to nothing about the actual catastrophe but experience instead its effects: removals and dislocations, the vanishing of things long taken for granted, improvised communities, strained relationships.

We do not get a plot, exactly, and thanks to the unvarying regularity of the sestets and some recurring details (a song called "Elsewhere, Elsewhere," the word "creamy," a grasshopper that gets killed) time seems to be standing still. Gelman mentions in a note that the poem was in part inspired by Eric Satie's "Vexations," a one-page piece of piano music that is to be repeated 840 times, with performances taking as long as 20-some hours. Gelman's Vexations has a similarly mesmerizing here-we-go-round-again feel. 

Part of the trance is that the text has no periods, making the reader's parsing of individual lines somewhat mobile. Sometimes two consecutive lines will seem to be syntactically and semantically entangled, but just as often they seem to be non sequiturs, and sometimes they flicker back and forth, now waves, now particles...an Ashberyean effect that kept things from ever settling down into predictability (that great hazard of post-apocalyptic fictions).

We know time is passing, though, because the narrator gives birth to a daughter on the first page and by the last page the daughter is (I think) on the verge of puberty. The narrator's valiant attempts to honor the duties of parenthood in the wake of civilization's collapse might remind you a bit of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but making it a mother-daughter story places it in quite another key, with (for me) the Persephone archetype looming awfully on the final page. 

Quite a book. Hard to put down, and not just because it has no end-stop punctuation.